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The explosion last month at the Adler Hot Oil shop in Jensen, Utah, resulted from a leak of up to 475 gallons of liquid propane from two truck-mounted tanks, according to investigators. "We had nearly the perfect storm inside the building," said Brett Lane, Jensen's assistant fire chief. Investigators found "no indicators of criminal or fraudulent activity," and the explosion was "an accident that unfortunately damaged 26 structures," Lane said.

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U.S. farmers are well ahead of their usual corn planting pace this year, as 55% of the crop was planted by May 3, compared with a five-year average of 38%. The productivity and favorable growing conditions have caused corn prices to sink, according to Betsy Jensen, farmer and editor of Prairie Grains magazine. "The market is solidly bearish. It's going to be tough to find any bullish news," said Jensen.

A grease-to-biofuel startup called Revolution Fuels has raised nearly $1 million in a new funding round. The company uses truck-mounted systems to travel to restaurants and other businesses, converting waste grease to fuel.

Utah is installing 11,000 solar panels on the roof of the Calvin L. Rampton Salt Palace Convention Center, a project that helped the city win a bid to host a green-building conference next year by the National Association of Home Builders. The solar panels will occupy a rooftop area as large as six football fields, making it the largest such system in the country, and generate about 2.6 megawatts of energy, enough to meet a quarter of the convention center's annual energy needs.

The country should not rush to prohibit nuclear-waste imports, as some states may seek to store the material to generate jobs even if Utah does not, said Sen. Bob Bennett, R-Utah. His statement comes in response to a bill to ban such imports that the House has already approved. The measure is intended to prevent EnergySolutions from importing up to 20,000 tons of waste from Italy to be processed in Tennessee. Of that, 1,600 tons would be kept at the company's site in Utah.

Lawmakers are calling on Bayer CropScience to stop or reduce the use of the highly toxic chemical methyl isocyanate, which was at risk of release following a deadly 2008 explosion at a plant in West Virginia. In a letter to the U.S. Chemical Safety Board, lawmakers wrote that an investigation found the MIC tank at the plant was damaged in the explosion. Had the chemical been released, the consequences could have been grave, they wrote, referencing a 1984 disaster in India in which thousands died after an MIC leak.